David Murdock has put his conglomerate Castle & Cooke’s 20,000-lot portfolio of residential land on the market. He is pictured in this 2010 file photo.

Recent multibillion-dollar deals in the home-building industry have emboldened potential sellers, and now billionaire David Murdock has put his conglomerate Castle & Cooke Inc.’s 20,000-lot portfolio of residential land on the market to gauge the interest it attracts.

Many of Castle & Cooke’s home lots are located in California and Hawaii, though it also owns residential land in Arizona and North Carolina. It is known in the mainland U.S. mostly as a developer in secondary and tertiary markets such as Bakersfield, Calif.

Analysts and brokers familiar with the Castle & Cooke residential portfolio say it likely will fetch several hundred million dollars if it is sold, piecemeal or in whole. Any deal would hinge on Mr. Murdock, who owns Castle & Cooke after taking it private in 2000. Separately, he now is trying to take private Dole Food Co., of which he is founder and CEO, in a $1.2 billion deal.

Castle & Cooke, based in Los Angeles, has hired brokerage Eastdil Secured to market the residential land to potential equity partners and purchasers. It remains possible that Mr. Murdock will opt against selling the portfolio, as he did last year in shopping Castle & Cooke’s portfolio of commercial land and then withdrawing it from the market.

“He will look at everything,” said Bruce Freeman, president of Castle & Cooke’s mainland U.S. operations. “All sorts of different offers may come in. We told Eastdil that their primary charter is to look at refinancing, but they’ll look at everything.”

The Castle & Cooke properties span vastly different markets, from Oahu to Bakersfield. “These are very diverse holdings in tertiary markets,” said John Burns, an Irvine, Calif.-based consultant to the home-building industry. “I doubt there are many buyers who would want the whole thing. It would make more sense to break it up.”

Castle & Cooke owns more than 3,000 lots on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, where undeveloped land is scarce and gaining government approvals can be difficult. It also holds roughly 3,000 lots in Lake Elsinore, an inland city between Los Angeles and San Diego, and roughly 2,000 lots in and around Bakersfield.

Castle & Cooke earlier sold one of its unique land holdings, agreeing last year to sell the 141-square-mile island of Lanai in Hawaii to Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison for an undisclosed price. The conglomerate’s origins stretch to 1851, when Samuel Northrup Castle and Amos Starr Cooke opened a general store together. The company now owns various subsidiaries in food, transportation and real estate.

Castle & Cooke’s Mr. Freeman said the timing of Mr. Murdock’s decision to market the residential portfolio isn’t related to the Shapell and Weyerhaeuser deals. Even so, he added, “Mr. Murdock is opportunistic when things come up.”

Some observers say it is logical that more big portfolios will follow the Shapell and Weyerhaeuser deals.

“While the (new-home) market has softened up a little overall, I think the demand for the two portfolios demonstrates optimism for residential (development) in the next three to five years,” said Tom Doyle, a partner in land brokerage WD Land Inc., based in Irvine, Calif. “There still is continued deep demand for large portfolios in the marketplace.”